Yet, says Dabashi, perhaps the text's greatest sin is its evacuation of history: "What is impossible to miss is the almost total absence of any sort of Iranian context.… There is not a single word as to why millions of people poured into streets and risked (and often lost) their lives to topple one of the most savage military dictatorships in modern history. It is as if the sole purpose of the 1979 revolution had been to inconvenience Nafisi."

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 219